Calls to defund the police ask us to imagine safety from the perspective of those who are the frequent targets of policing and understand that it is the world that is built from that perspective that will be a better world for us all.
criminal justice
Why doesn’t the American public use its power over the gun business?
As teenagers in Parkland, Florida, dressed for the funerals of their friends – the latest victims of a mass shooting in the U.S. – weary outrage poured forth on social media and in op-eds across the country. Once again, survivors, victims’ families and critics of U.S. gun laws demanded action to address the never-ending cycle of mass shootings and routine violence ravaging American … Continue reading »
Taxpayers, indirect subsidies and influencing America’s gun lobby
After Stephen Paddock opened fire on Las Vegas concertgoers on Oct. 1, many people responded with calls for more gun control to help prevent mass shootings and the routine violence ravaging U.S. neighborhoods. But besides a rare consensus on restricting the availability of so-called bump stocks, which Paddock used to enable his dozen semi-automatic rifles to fire like machine guns, it’s unclear if anything meaningful will … Continue reading »
Drug decriminalization: what we can (and can’t) learn from Portugal
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the acquisition, possession and personal use of small quantities of all psychoactive drugs. Drug use is still prohibited and subject to administrative sanction, but the law eliminated incarceration as a potential penalty. Portugal’s decriminalization law has been appropriated in U.S. drug policy discussions, mostly an example of a radical and successful … Continue reading »
Capital punishment’s loyal officer
It was a zinger worthy of a Presidential debate (and almost certainly just as planned). Justice Samuel Alito, confronted Federal Public Defender Robin Conrad in the midst of her oral argument on April 29 in Glossip v. Gross, a case challenging Oklahoma’s lethal injection execution procedure. Yes. I mean, let’s be honest about what’s going on here. … Continue reading »
Carceral geographies: Mapping the escape routes from mass incarceration
Today and tomorrow (Sept. 18-19, 2014) at UC Berkeley we will be launching a new undergraduate course thread titled “Carceral Geographies.” Our launch will begin with a keynote address by the great Ruth “Ruthie” Wilson Gimore, scholar/activist extraordinaire who has given us the definitive study of California’s descent into mass incarceration, Golden Gulags: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, … Continue reading »
The real problem with mass incarceration? Inhumanity
We may disagree on who belongs and who does not belong in prison, or on how long prison sentences should be, or what goals those sentences should be meted out to accomplish. But one thing we should not, must not disagree on, is that those prisons should be humane. What is humane? Humane means treating a … Continue reading »
Life in prison with the remote possibility of death: the death penalty and California’s broken punishment paradigm
This week’s 39-page opinion by U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney — finding California’s death penalty unconstitutional — is already setting off a wave of debate in the media. We will see yet whether it catches any political fire in this dry, but so-far politically placid, season in California. There is much to recommend in the opinion (read it here courtesy … Continue reading »
Botched execution
To “botch” something is to carry out a task “badly or carelessly.” Oklahoma’s botched execution Tuesday, April 29, 2014 demonstrated that word in its absolute in-glory. (Read the New York Times account here). Badly? Executions always cause at least psychological pain. Even if everything goes perfectly, the physical pains involved in injecting the drugs may … Continue reading »
Dying inside: Lifers, the dying and California’s correctional paradigm
Before the hospice program started by prison chaplain Lorie Adolff, dying prisoners in California’s state prison in San Luis Obsipo (California Men’s Colony) just expired alone in their cells, with prison nurses looking in periodically until their vital signs ceased. Adolff’s project, Supportive Care Services, trains other prisoners, most of them lifers, to sit with … Continue reading »
Abandoning a failed penal experiment: New York’s historic advantage
The State of New York has made it share of bad penal policy choices. Remember the “Rockefeller Drug Laws” — mandatory life sentences for persons arrested with large quantities of dangerous drugs, which helped set the nation on the path toward indiscriminate use of incarceration? But the Empire State has also had a historic knack … Continue reading »
From humanity to health: Why can’t California get prison healthcare right?
To considerable embarrassment, no doubt, in the Brown-Beard administration, admissions to California’s newest prison near Stockton California were halted Feb. 5 by the court-appointed healthcare receiver, law professor Clark Kelso. The prison, the first new facility in a decade, is the lynch-pin of the administration’s frequent claim to have gotten on top of California’s decades … Continue reading »
From the War on Crime to ‘World War Z’: What the zombie apocalypse can tell us about the current state of our culture of fear
Zombies are everywhere. Ok not (yet) on the streets (so far as I know); but in our cultural imaginary they are everywhere. You can find them (in small groups and hordes) in high budget nail biting thriller movies like Brad Pitt’s World War Z (2013), on television, and all over print and digital reading material, much of … Continue reading »
Yes, Virginia, there is a death penalty: Reflections on the Christmas moratorium
On the 19th of December, the paper of record, the New York Times, ran a story discussing the lower number of executions (39) in 2013 than in a previous years; a trend that began sometime ago (read it here). The causes of this trend are complex and fascinating and worthy of more comment, but here I … Continue reading »
‘Justice’ in the murder years: More tales from the Brooklyn crypt
The New York Times continues its on going series of investigatory features on wrongful convictions or likely wrongful convictions produced by Brooklyn’s law enforcement and court system in the 1980s and early 1990s with a gripping and sad story by Frances Robles on two Brooklyn teenagers (now 30 and 31) convicted of killing a corrections … Continue reading »
To the Fruitvale Station
Thanks to the persistence of my wife who has insisted for some time that as residents of the East Bay we must see it in the theater along with fellow East Bayers, our whole family saw this remarkable film a couple of weeks ago. The film moved me to tears and then settled into my … Continue reading »
Beard must go: California needs a fresh start in corrections, not a cover-up for business as usual
When Governor Brown appointed Jeffrey Beard to be the new Secretary of Corrections in California last year, it was supposed to signal a new era. After decades of Correctional leaders who were insiders, brought up in a system that had normalized a state of permanent crisis and systemic inhumanity, Mr. Beard looked to be reason … Continue reading »
Hunger
Today, July 8, 2013, prisoners in California’s supermax “SHU” units (for Secured Housing Units), are commencing a hunger strike and work stoppage, their second in two years (read the solidarity statement here). This is tragic. Hunger strikes are an extraordinary act of self deprivation by people who have almost nothing. They can result in the … Continue reading »
Prosecution complex: Persecuting Aaron Swartz and degrading the Constitution
There should be a difference between prosecution and persecution. The long “War on Crime,” America’s longest, has gone on a lot longer (’67 to now), and done a lot more damage to American law and society, than most people reckon (at least those who missed my 2007 tome, Governing through Crime: How the War on … Continue reading »
Lessons from the ‘sordid decades’: Miscarriages of justice in NY’s ‘War on Crime’ in the ’80s and ’90s
Any reader of the paper of record will be impressed with the series of impressive features dealing with various aspects of county level justice in the five boroughs that make up New York City. While not all of them have cast their gaze backwards (for instance the superb recent series on delay in the Bronx County courts). … Continue reading »